


The Crawl

by Derkish



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Casual Domesticity, Discussion of Death, Established Relationship, Fluff, Growing Old Together, Holding Hands, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Light Angst, M/M, People Thinking Really Hard, Post-Canon, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 04:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20558555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derkish/pseuds/Derkish
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley begin to notice some troublesome changes while traveling on holiday.  They don't consider their options.





	The Crawl

_One_.

They were meant to be on holiday, but here was Crowley, praying for death.

He leaned heavily on the railing, trying to absorb the coolness of the steel into his skin. Someone had told him to keep looking at the horizon, but every time he tried, it disappeared under a rolling wave and sent him lurching. So instead, he hung back off the stern of the boat, waiting for this godforsaken day trip to end. 

He had lost track of Aziraphale. He had met a couple traveling from Canada, and last Crowley knew, they were all deep into their drinks and bickering jovially about something menial. At this point, anyway, Crowley preferred to be left alone with the only other person on this floating nightmare who really understood him: the pregnant lady standing to his right. Presently, she was losing her lunch into the Massachusetts Bay and making the worst hacking sound he had ever heard. He estimated her to be in her mid-thirties, with long hair that she had tied up in a bun to stop from hanging in her face. Purely as a precaution, and for no other reason, Crowley had done the same.

On a guess, she had maybe, at most, two months until baby show time. He had to look away as she heaved again.

Crowley had never experienced anything like this. Not in 1011 during his excursion with the Vikings. Not in Tripoli in the nineteenth century. Not even on the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_. 

“You’re just going to toss it all up in a minute,” he said to the woman, who had stopped retching and started stuffing her mouth full of crystallized ginger. 

She gave him a despairing look. “I can’t believe this is happening. I haven’t even seen one single whale!”

Crowley chanced a glance up as the sounds of cheering children announced the sighting of another dorsal fin or waving tail. But his vision spun, and he returned to watching the motor churn the water below. He hadn’t actually puked yet. Not ever, not once in six thousand years. He would not do it now, he would _not_.

He needed something. Anything. A distraction. Over to his left, a young man was kissing his girlfriend with great enthusiasm, paying no mind to the two suffering individuals behind him (or the whales, for that matter). Crowley spied a pack of cigarettes poking out of the back of his pocket. 

Was it that smoking made people sick, or quelled the nausea? He couldn’t recall whether it was one, the other, or both. He reached over, slipped the box open with a finger, and slid one of the cigarettes out. 

The pregnant woman had been watching him. When he turned to wiggle the little white cylinder in her direction, she shook her head.

“You won’t be able to light it,” she said. “Too much wind.”

Ordinarily she would have been right. For him, though, all it took was making a show of his hands like he was fetching a lighter from his pocket, then ducking his head and covering his mouth as if to block the wind. He pinched the end of the cigarette between his fingers, and when he returned to view, it was lit. 

“How’d you do that?” said the woman, impressed as was possible while holding her head in her hands.

“Old parlour trick.”

He took a long, luxurious pull and slowly let the breath out. He hadn’t had a smoke since The Wall, 1979, and even then, he’d only done it to blend in with the crowd. Now, as he felt the nicotine crawling through his central nervous system, he had a moment of understanding. 

The singular relief was quickly replaced by an even worse spasm. Crowley suddenly remembered the thing he’d learned about smoking and nausea. Someone at a pub in Ireland had explained it: “_If you’re a hungover piece of shit, a cigarette might help, but if not, you’ll just barf_.”

Too late now. Crowley had already committed. He steeled himself against the urge to lean over the rail, took another drag, and told himself that this little bundle of dried leaves wrapped in paper was the cure for all his problems. After teetering on the brink, something gave way in his mind, and reality adapted to his willpower. He might not be able to make awfulness stop, but he could make it less.

Beside him, the woman sighed deeply. He resurfaced from his thought to find her eyes tracking the cigarette from his mouth to his fingers. 

“I just remembered,” he told her, “they make you feel worse, not better.”

“Not me. I’ve been craving a smoke for eight months.”

Wordlessly, he offered it to her. She gave him an incredulous look. 

“It’s almost done growing now, isn’t it?” he said. “Seems to me like the bigger risk is if you keep tossing your guts all over.”

The woman looked over her shoulder, as if expecting to find her spouse standing there. The rest of the passengers were crowded up by the bow, watching the whales surface while a naturalist went on about their migratory patterns. Back on this end, it was just the two of them and the overeager young couple (thoroughly distracted). 

“All right, just one.” 

She took the cigarette from him, stuck it in her mouth, and sucked in a deep breath. Like a pro. He could literally see the relief as it fell over her face.

When she turned, flicking the ash over the side of the boat, she found Crowley staring with his eyebrows far over the rims of his glasses.

“Maybe—” she said, hesitant to hand it back. “Maybe just two.”

She returned for another drag, but the second she pulled in a lungful, a voice called out from behind.

“Everything all right back here?”

The cigarette fell from between her fingers as she leapt in surprise and clapped a hand over her mouth to stop the smoke from streaming out. Crowley let out a half disappointed, half annoyed moan as he watched his only cure drop into the water.

Aziraphale had come up behind him, out of nowhere. For once he blended in, in relative terms; he had donned khaki slacks and golf shirt that Crowley had all but threatened him into wearing (Crowley hadn’t pick the outfit, but he did threaten to shove him into the harbor like Francis Akeley with a box of tea if we wore a three piece suit to a whale watch). He was even drinking tap beer out of a little red plastic cup, and looking surprisingly pleased about it. No doubt he considered it the total immersive experience.

“My dear, you’ll never guess—Michael and Jamie are paleontologists! They’ve been telling me all about the ‘_Mesozoic period_,’” said Aziraphale, in an unnecessarily suspicious tone. 

“Angel—”

“People get so worked up about dinosaurs, don’t they? Oh, this is cute,” said Aziraphale, reaching up in passing to touch the loose knot of hair on Crowley’s head, and seeming to miss Crowley’s scandalized expression.

Crowley tugged him around by the shoulder. Behind them, the woman finally let go of her breath, and the cigarette cloud dissipated around her face. Neither of them paid her any mind.

“Something is wrong,” said Crowley, in a weak voice. “I’ve never had an ounce of nausea in all my life. Why now?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” said Aziraphale, with a wave of his cup. “I did warn you about the street food, though, didn’t I? The Americans and their food trucks... I don’t trust the window signs. They can’t all have gotten A’s on their inspections...”

“I don’t think it was the lobster roll,” said Crowley. 

“Let’s get you a drink. That ought to settle your stomach.”

The hand at the small of Crowley’s back began to steer him away from the sanctity of the stern, toward the cabin and the galley. 

“Do you smell smoke, by the way?”

xxx

_Two_.

The night was alight with sound and color. They ambled side by side along the Harborwalk, watching the end of summer festival reach its peak. All around them, families had claimed spots along the pier. Couples set up chairs and rolled out blankets in preparation for the fireworks at nine. The children were out in full force, bedecked in blinking neon hats and brandishing flashing toy swords. The sound of plastic carnival horns had risen to a fever pitch.

“—really unnecessary, Crowley.”

Aziraphale was scolding him. The effect was somewhat lost, given that he was holding a purple lightsaber. Almost absently, Crowley reached for Aziraphale’s other hand where it dangled by his side.

“Couldn’t help it. Old habits and all.” 

“A hundred, though. Really! The poor parents won’t sleep for a week.”

To be fair, Crowley hadn’t known that there was a hundred. He’d simply handed a thick wad of bills over to the smock-clad, visor-wearing carnival toy vendor and told him to hand out every vuvuzela on his cart to the next however many kids to walk by. 

Crowley liked the commotion and the crowd. The anonymity of being one or two amid tens of thousands had always served them well over the years. The added chaos of pre-firework festivities only added to the fun. Aziraphale was starting to look overwhelmed, though, and so Crowley let him steer them through the swarm of children to a less clustered portion of the pier. They spent several minutes in comfortable silence, with the nearby sounds of the harbor mingling into the bandstand music across the way. 

A pop-up cluster of tents marked the far border of the festival, where artists were selling their fares. Crowley thought that past a booth taken up by a woman selling kombucha, he could make out an antique book vendor. The tent had the telltale yellowed lamp and the lack of foot traffic, anyway. 

“Angel, look, is that—huh?”

Crowley looked down and saw his hand was empty. He spun around. 

“Angel?” he said to the air.

Scanning the nearby faces, he saw nothing familiar. An old sensation ticked up on the back of his neck. Alarms were ringing in his head.

The thought hadn’t crossed his mind in nearly eight years, but there it was. Had the agents of Heaven and Hell finally changed their minds about leaving them alone—?

He pushed back through the crowd, calling out “Aziraphale!” over the blare of a hundred toy horns. The faces around him were all strangers. Crowley felt the panic begin to creep in. 

That was when he saw the purple lightsaber glowing on the walking path. Next to it, sitting precariously on the curb with his head in his hands, was Aziraphale. A senior citizen with a black poodle was crouching down beside him, one hand on his arm. Crowley full-out ran over to them.

“Angel!” 

He skidded to a stop as he dropped to his knees, not feeling the pain when he hit the stone pavers. 

“Angel, is it?” said the elderly person to Aziraphale, in what must have been a deliberately soothing voice. “Can you hear me, Angel?”

Crowley had already framed his hands around Aziraphale’s face and lifted it up. He peered over the rims of his sunglasses, searching for an answer. Aziraphale’s eyes were unfocused, half-lidded. He looked to be tipping in and out of consciousness.

Even with a bystander hovering so close, Crowley could only think of one thing to do, so he did it. He put a hand on each of Aziraphale’s shoulders, and imagined that everything was fine. Crowley focused on the thought—he pictured Aziraphale straightening up and shrugging off this... whatever it was. 

Several moments passed. Nothing. Crowley relented, aghast, just as he had been a few days before on the back of that damn boat.

“Should I call an ambulance?” the person asked, startling him. 

“What—? No, er, just—” Crowley gave Aziraphale a little shake in one last effort to rouse him. There were no mind games in it—just run-of-the-mill desperation. “Can you hear me in there? Are you all right?”

Aziraphale blinked hard. He seemed to come-to at the sound of Crowley’s voice. 

“Me?” he said, sounding surprised.

“Yes, you! The fool sitting on the ground.”

“Ah... yes, that’s right. Tad woozy is all.”

Aziraphale made to stand up. Halfway through the motion, his knees buckled and he careened, landing back on the edge of the walkway. Crowley grabbed him before he could topple backwards.

“A bit... spinny,” said Aziraphale. 

The poodle licked his hand. Instinctively, Aziraphale gave the dog a scratch behind the ear, still looking dazed. Crowley was supporting most of his weight. The dog’s owner was ferreting through their reusable shopping bag. After a few seconds, they came up with a clear plastic bottle.

“He needs water,” they said, unscrewing the lid and handing it over.

“Does he?” said Crowley. It was not so much a question as it was a statement. 

Crowley pressed the water into Aziraphale’s hands and told him to drink it. Indeed, as he began to sip down the bottle’s contents, he started to perk back up. By the time the bottle was empty, he seemed almost normal.

“What was that?” Crowley said, as the stranger and their dog were walking away. 

Aziraphale was still waving a thankful goodbye to the retreating figures. When he realized Crowley was still scowling at him expectantly, his cheerful posture dropped. 

“Oh, relax, it was nothing. One too many drinks at lunch, I’d say.” He glanced off to the right, and then back to Crowley, and then smiled as though Crowley would not notice. He gave Crowley’s knee a squeeze. “Do you think there’s anyone selling books around here? I’ve had my eye open for something local.”

xxx

_Three_.

Crowley had not bothered to dress. He lay on his stomach in a languid sprawl across the bed. One foot poked out beneath the white linens to draw a lazy arch in the air, back and forth. He was leafing through one of the magazines that he found on the coffee table, a pillow propped under his chin.

“Paul Revere,” he said.

“Obviously,” said Aziraphale.

Aziraphale’s pulse had finally lulled back to its normal state, but he could still feel the heat in his face. He busied himself over the mugs in the kitchenette, casting glances in Crowley’s direction as often as he could without pouring hot water on his hand. 

Crowley turned a page. “Edgar Allen Poe.”

“No.” 

“Well why not? They were around at the same time.”

The response was only half attentive. “If I had met Paul Revere on his dying day...” Aziraphale squinted at the arrangement he had set on the serving tray. Two cups, a steeping pot, a bowl of fruit, and what else? Ah. He set a pair of cloth napkins alongside the pot. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”

“Poe.”

“Right, of course. If I had met Paul Revere on his dying day, Poe would have been no more than... what, ten years old?”

“Nine,” Crowley confirmed, pointing to a paragraph that Aziraphale could not see from across the room. “What about Sylvia Plath?”

“Never got the chance, I’m afraid. Why do you always end up on poets, wherever we go?”

The look Crowley shot him over his shoulder was no doubt intended to rile, and it did. “I know you fancy poets.”

“I don’t—fancy—anyone!” said Aziraphale, annoyed at the rush of heat back to his cheeks. He mechanically straightened the knot on his bathrobe and smoothed out the front. Then he flashed an indulgent grin. “Except for you, darling, you know I fancy you most.”

He picked up the heavy tray, carefully balancing it by the handles. Outside, the pale grey of morning had yet to give way to the blue sky that was forecast for today. An ambient breeze floated in from the balcony door. Aziraphale paused by it on his way past, just long enough to feel to cool air. 

“You just said ‘most,’” Crowley pointed out, as Aziraphale slid the tray onto the bedside table. 

“Did I? Make some room, please.”

Crowley flipped the magazine closed—Aziraphale caught the article headline “Top 100 Boston Figures”—and tossed it aside. As he tucked his arms close to his sides and pushed himself halfway up, Aziraphale watched the slow movement of his shoulder blades as they rolled together, then apart. 

“It’s so early,” said Crowley, stifling a yawn.

“We’ve still got a lot to see before the end of the week.” 

Crowley had been taking his sweet time in rolling over to make a space for Aziraphale, and now he paused, balanced on his side. “Are you gonna wake me up like that every day from here on till Saturday, angel, or did I do some accidental good deed yesterday?”

“My affections are not a merit-based system,” said Aziraphale, feigning offense. He sat on the edge of the bed. “But... if you must know, it was last night at the symphony.”

Crowley reached across Aziraphale’s lap and into the fruit bowl, where he picked out a slice of mango. “Oh really?” he said. “What did I do? Hold the door open for some old lady?”

“Nothing. Black tie suits you, is all.”

Crowley stuck the tip of his thumb into his mouth after he’d finished his bite, cleaning off the last bit of stickiness from the mango. He was wiping his hand on the sheet when Aziraphale bent over and kissed him. 

Crowley made a soft, surprised sound on contact—the loveliest sound on earth, as far as Aziraphale was concerned. He had not intended to stay, but as he started to retreat, he found Crowley’s hand at the nape of his neck. So instead he lingered, and deepened the kiss, and broke away only to breathe again.

“You...” He trailed off, flustered.

“Me what?” said Crowley, looking up at him.

Aziraphale cradled Crowley’s head between his hands, and kissed the corner of his mouth. Then he pressed a kiss against his brow, and another at the top of his head. And then—

He saw.

Aziraphale went uncommonly still. Crowley tensed as he sensed the change in tone.

“Angel, what—? Ow! What the _hell_?”

When Aziraphale let go of Crowley and appeared back in view, all the pretty color had left his face. He held up his hand between them. There, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, was a single grey hair. 

A stunned silence fell over them. Aziraphale looked at Crowley. Crowley stared back. 

_Click_.

xxx

“So what, it’s one grey hair. I’ve got loads of them!”

Aziraphale tightened the grip on his teacup and reminded himself of his innate and virtuous patience. 

“Yes, Newton, but we—” he gestured between himself at the counter and where Crowley sat at the kitchen table several feet away, “—are not human. We are, generously speaking, celestial and-or ethereal.”

“You’ve got human bodies, though.”

“The same bodies that we have had since the dawn of creation.” He set his cup on the counter with a little too much force. “Bodies that are missing the bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy. We do not need food, water, or sleep. And above all, we do not age.”

“Apparently you do,” said Anathema, from where she stood behind Adam’s chair.

“But we never have before.”

This had not even been the reason for their get-together in Tadfield. They had meant to have a cheerful visit with Adam after his first few weeks away at university. His education had just begun, and already he had lofty new ideas and even higher aspirations. Aziraphale feared he may be headed toward a career in politics—he certainly had the charisma. There was a joke about his parentage as well, but Aziraphale was in no mood to make it.

The odd personal events weighed heavily on his mind. The others had noticed that something was off, and they hadn’t had to push very hard before Aziraphale was running his mouth. He had gabbed enough about it for he and Crowley both, which was saying something, because Crowley had said next to nothing all day. Since turning up at the Young house, the only words from his mouth had been “all right” when Adam asked if he would paint his nails. Adam had a natural intuition about these things.

Since then, he’d been leaning over Adam’s splayed hands with his sunglasses pushed up over his forehead like a pair of goggles, wielding a tiny brush dipped in charcoal paint.

“I’d say there’s got to be a book on this somewhere,” said Anathema, fervently. “But you’re the first ones, aren’t you?”

“The only ones, far as I know,” said Aziraphale.

“It doesn’t seem that surprising,” said Adam, who made a point of never being surprised by anything. “You chose the human experience, didn’t you? Getting old is part of that.”

“Yes, and no. It was... more of a consequence. Among choices.”

“It may be foreign to you, but that’s life for us: food, water, and shelter,” Anathema said. “And it’s not like it’s all bad, all the time—look at Crowley, for instance. He may have gotten a little sunburn on his nose during your vacation, but now he has those cute freckles.”

Still bent over the table, Crowley only paused in his work to shoot her his most murderous look. Unfortunately for him, Anathema was immune to that kind of baseless threat by now. 

Aziraphale sighed. Perhaps venting his worries about death and the waning of their miraculous abilities to a group of mortals was not the best approach. He had hoped that one of them might have something to say other than “everybody dies.” To be fair, though, that was what he would have expected from this group under any other circumstances. They just didn’t know what the next phase had in store for him and Crowley. Or what they had sacrificed to reach the place they were. 

Adam shrugged in his noncommittal way, taking care not to budge his hands. “I don’t see any use in worrying about it. You could get run over by a car tomorrow, and that’d be it. Just like any of us.”

“Well, not quite like you,” Aziraphale said with a nervous titter. 

Newt scrunched his nose. “Why, what happens when you... discorporate?”

“Depends on how it happens,” said Crowley, and everyone but Adam jumped. 

Crowley capped the bottle of polish and set it on the table. 

“It’s one of two possible outcomes. One is almost certainly torture for the rest of eternity at the hands of an angry mob. The other—” He turned around in his chair to look pointedly at Aziraphale, “is regular old oblivion.”

“Oh,” Newt said. “Oblivion somehow sounds a lot less awful when you say it that way.”

“Doesn’t it?” Crowley said, not breaking eye contact with his husband.

At home, they had a safe. In the safe, they had two items: an old thermos, and a small black bowl with a tight seal. He had never asked where Crowley had managed to procure the bowl, because he did not want to know. He had put it from his mind years ago, once he had finally come to believe that the higher authorities had left them to their own business. 

The safe was meant to stay closed for another several thousand years. 

Aziraphale looked away first, only to quash the tension of the group. Soon enough, the humans went back to speculating about the afterlife, which inevitably lapsed into an argument with Adam about the viability of wind farms as a viable fossil fuel alternative. Aziraphale feigned amusement and clutched his teacup, even though all the liquid was gone.

Eventually, when the others were distracted, Crowley stole away from the kitchen table and joined him by the counter. 

“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice, pouring the tea from his own cup into Aziraphale’s empty one. 

It was room temperature by now, but Aziraphale accepted it, and took a long drink, and was grateful for the dry, savory taste. Afterwards, he eyed Crowley over the brim of the cup. His red hair was stuck up in the front from wearing his glasses on his head.

Aziraphale smoothed Crowley’s hair over with his fingertips, and said, very quietly, “I love you.”

Cute freckles be damned.

xxx

This was too familiar to be a dream, and Aziraphale did not remember falling asleep. 

The white marble shone brighter than he remembered. Sunlight seemed to light the room from every angle, sourceless, perpetually reflecting off the windows and the walls. Aziraphale stood alone in the center of it, and for a moment, was too puzzled to be afraid.

“Hello,” said a Voice.

The sound emanated from everywhere, and nowhere. It was spectral but solid, and so pervasive that he would swear that it amassed before his eyes. Aziraphale blinked and saw nothing. He felt the presence around him, and inside him. He had forgotten what that was like. 

“Er, hello,” Aziraphale answered. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“You have been unsupervised on Earth for some time.”

“Yes, well—not entirely unsupervised, I’m sure. Omniscience and all of that.”

Talking to the disembodied voice of God was not something that one got used to doing, particularly when one had not done it in several thousand years. Aziraphale found his fingers twisting together as he glanced around, looking for a source without expecting to find it.

“You were designed to serve,” said the Voice. “All of my children, the ascended and the fallen, have roles to fulfill. Some are born to give life, and others to destroy. Some to tempt, and some to comfort. You were not made to walk among humans without divine purpose. Now that you have turned from your Sphere, you will find that your powers wane, as does your body.”

It was a long story to have to explain, so Aziraphale said nothing. Presumably, the Voice already knew.

“You have opted to walk away from your post, Principality. Now you make one more choice.”

“Where is Crowley?” Aziraphale asked. 

“He is deciding for himself.”

The Voice continued.

“If you wish to take up your place among the angels, I will make it so. Your brethren will forget your offenses. Your corporal form will be renewed, and your capacity for miracles restored to its highest potency. For this, you must return to service.”

“I understand.”

“Then you understand the alternative,” the Voice said. “You may return to Earth, if you wish, and live as you were. In time, you will find that the divinity leaves your physical form. That is the way of life there, by my design. You will wither, as humans wither, and you will die.”

Not ‘discorporate,’ but ‘die.’ Aziraphale pondered the word. 

“If I may,” he said hesitantly, but did not wait for permission to speak further. “What then? Does the army of angels get to shred my soul, or lock it away forever?” They had been waiting for some time, he was sure. 

“Your soul is, and has always been, mine,” said the Voice. “Upon your death, should you embrace that path, I will do as I see fit with it.”

“Surely—” Aziraphale stopped, feeling almost foolish for saying it, “Surely you must know what I will choose. You made me, after all.”

“I designed you with free will.”

A few seconds stretched on. At last, Aziraphale found the courage to speak. “How long?”

“Pardon?” said the Voice. It sounded, despite all expectation, taken-aback.

“How long will we have? On Earth?”

“You assume his choice.”

“I do.”

“I have offered him the same as I have offered you—reinstatement to the ranks of angels, and freedom from the influences of Hell. An eternal lifetime in the comfort and service of Heaven.”

An eternal lifetime. If Crowley chose it, and Aziraphale chose it, they could ascend together and never face the end. They could be… not together, but nearby. And safe. The thought rose in his heart as a fleeting possibility, but quickly staled as he grasped the truth of it, and all that it entailed.

“A year?” Aziraphale pressed, no longer afraid. “Ten years? Ten thousand? A human lifespan, or something in between?”

“You are greedy,” the Voice bristled.

“I’m not,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Offer me ten minutes with him, and I’ll take it.”

“Very well.”

The dream was fading. The great marble walls seemed to slide in towards him, pushing him toward the window. The fog began to swarm his sight. Around him, glass shattered. The wind kicked up, stinging his face. He felt the shards of windowpane tear across his skin, through his soul.

And as he tumbled out into the open sky, he heard the Voice one last time, sitting in the back of his mind: “Long,” it said. “But not eternity. At least... not on Earth.”

The walls were white, but not familiar. Aziraphale spun back to consciousness to find himself reclined in a bed he’d never seen before. With a stranger looming over him. Not Heaven, but not—?

“Where is this?” His voice was papery and thin, as if from sleep. 

“St. Thomas.’”

“Who?”

The stranger edged back from him, as if concerned that he might reach out and strike. “The—the hospital. You’ve had a… an incident.”

Only then did he recognize the uniform of a medical assistant. St. Thomas,’ Hospital. Yes, he had been here before, while on duty for a small handful of blessings (and oddly, once, a temptation). Aziraphale sat up. He still had his clothes, though his shirt was horribly wrinkled, and his jacket was missing. Someone had rolled up one of his sleeves and stuck a bandage at the crook of his elbow.

“I’m sorry, did you say ‘incident?’”

“Someone found you at St. James Park. You were unconscious.”

“Alone?”

“No there was another guy. The one… with…the eyes.” The assistant jerked a thumb over one shoulder, cringing. “They thought you might have OD’d, but the tox screens were all nega—what’re you doing?”

Aziraphale had lumbered to his feet. Where he expected his eyes to cloud with momentary dizziness, he was surprised to discover that, physically, he felt fine. He brushed past the medical assistant toward the door. Too dumbfounded by how quickly Aziraphale had moved, the assistant did not have time to react until he had disappeared around the corner of the doorway.

Out in the corridor, the smell of hand soap mingled with the persistent _ding-ding-ding_ of call bells. The handful of people in sight were all too busy with their own tasks to notice Aziraphale duck from his room and over to the next, in the direction of where the assistant had gestured. Pausing long enough to read ‘John Doe 2’ on the doorway name card, he slipped inside and closed the door.

The lights were out, but Crowley was there. Aziraphale noticed for the first time that the sun was setting over the Thames. A pink-gold hue was seeping through the window, pale and soft.

Crowley stirred at the sound of footsteps, and Aziraphale thought his heart might stop. Wordlessly, he watched as Crowley pushed himself upright and noticed the same things that Aziraphale had noticed on waking—the narrow bed, his rumpled clothes. Someone had stuck an IV in his arm. Crowley yanked it out as if it were a nuisance thread on his shirtsleeve. When blood began to percolate at the needle-site, he tapped the wound with one finger, as one might tap a broken watch. The blood vanished, the wound healed.

Finally, Crowley turned and looked at him. His expression shifted from alarm, to blankness, and then to what could only be described as amusement.

“I just had the weirdest dream,” he said, tilting his head to one side.

Aziraphale approached the bedside and grasped the plastic handrail for support. His chest felt tight, his sinuses burning. He forced himself to take in a shallow breath, and said, “How did it end?”

Crowley touched the side of Aziraphale’s face. “Same as always, angel. With you.”

xxx

There was an island out at the end of the salt flats, where the tourists liked to wade out during low tide. Tonight the tide was high, but Crowley could still get them there, with enough focus and the determined blink of an eye. 

The moon was setting, and the stars were bright. 

The last breath of summer still clung to the air, but a cool breeze was rolling off the ocean. Shivering, Aziraphale tightened the belt of his jacket, which he noticed was hanging a little looser than last spring. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Crowley apprising him. Aziraphale’s weight had dropped even more since recovering from a bout of summer flu, and while Crowley didn’t say anything about it, he knew it made him nervous—enough to suggest that they take a few days away from the smog of London, to clear the persistent cough from his chest.

They crossed around to the dark side of the island, where the land mass shielded the lights shining from houses built into the cliffs, and sat close on the flattest rock they could find.

“There we are,” Crowley said, after their eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

He tipped his chin up and watched the stars come into focus. Aziraphale watched him watch the sky, studied the sharp line of his pale throat against the dark backdrop. The wind whipped through Crowley’s short hair. It was shot through with swaths of grey, now, but sixty years had gone and the red was still fighting. 

“No moon tonight,” Crowley said. “Good viewing.”

He pointed out the old favorites. There was Andromeda, of course, and Alpha Centauri, their near-home. And Orion, and a dozen others they could not see, but knew were there. A happy passenger as always, Aziraphale let Crowley chauffeur him around the galaxy. The humans liked to challenge each other to count the stars. Aziraphale had never tried to do it, because he knew futility when he saw it. Crowley didn’t have to count—he knew each and every one by heart, innately. The entire universe lived inside him. 

“I can’t believe I’ve never asked you this,” Aziraphale said. It was frightfully important, all of a sudden, that he knew. “What’s your favorite star?”

“Mine? Oh. The humans haven’t discovered it yet, but I call it The Macaw.”

“The Macaw? Like the bird?”

“Yes—well, the bird is named after the star.”

A wave crashed against the rocks a few meters off, dusting them in its spray. Neither of them noticed, but when Aziraphale licked his lips, he tasted the salt.

“Why is it your favorite?”

Crowley shrugged, at ease. “I just liked the colors. The reds and blues and yellow and all. They sort of have their own sections, but with parts blended together at the ends. Like feathers... hence the bird, I suppose.”

Aziraphale looked up. “Where is it?” 

“Well, it’s—” Crowley leaned all the way back and raised his arm expectantly, but then he hesitated. He scanned the sky. His hand fell back down, and he rubbed his palm against one leg. “You know, I don’t remember.”

Too much. When Aziraphale felt the the tears begin to fall, he didn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t until Crowley heard the sniffling that he noticed. 

“Don’t get all blurry-eyed on me, angel. You won’t be able to see...”

Aziraphale felt Crowley’s arm coil around his shoulders. He sniffed again.

“You’re right,” he said. He coughed and blinked to clear his vision. “I wouldn’t want to waste a quintessential human moment.”

“And what’s that?”

“Staring up at the stars,” said Aziraphale. “Contemplating the ineffable universe. Not knowing what’s next.”

“Ah. That one.”

When Aziraphale said nothing, Crowley pulled him closer and kissed him on the temple. Aziraphale felt the warmth of his breath against the looming cold. 

“Was worth it, though, wasn’t it?” Crowley said, almost cheerfully.

Aziraphale nodded, silently, wiping his eyes and pressing his head into the safety of Crowley’s shoulder. 

The end advanced slowly. It plateaued on occasion, sometimes even seemed to stop. A year or five might skirt by without noticeable change. Inevitably, though, it would appear again. There was still time. They might have eighty years. Perhaps a hundred, or even more. And after… Aziraphale clung to the last words the Voice had left in his mind. He construed it as a promise. He willed it to be so.

God had called him greedy, and maybe he was.

They sat there for a long time, in stillness and in darkness. The stars grew brighter as the night grew darker, the Milky Way stretching all the way across, over their heads. 

At last, after an incalculable period, it was time to go home. They rose and stretched, backs sore and stiff from the hard stone seats. In the first moment, they were standing on the island. In another, they were back on the beach, making their way up the gradual slope toward civilization. As they reached the crest where the beach met the road, the first white light from town peaked up around a corner and flooded their eyes. 

Crowley found Aziraphale’s hand and grasped it tightly, their fingers interlacing.

“There goes my night vision,” he said.

Aziraphale craned his head around, towards the island and the glittering horizon, desperate for one last look. But Crowley had been right. All he saw was their two long shadows in the matchstick glow of the street light, walking side by side into the dark.

xxx

xxx

xxx


End file.
